... and here's why: Their first single.
The first single of the new American Idol is of course the third song they both sang during last night's performance show, 'No Boundaries' written by one of the judges, Kara DiGuardi and a bunch of other people nobody really cares about. Now Kara has written a bunch of songs for a lot of famous singers which went on to become big hits...so you would think the song she would help come up with for American Idol would be better than the fluffy attempts at being inspirational that previous American Idol winners had to churn out as their first single. At least I hoped so. Unfortunately, the producers still haven't learned from the criticism of previous seasons and decided once again to go down the fluffy inspirational nonsense road. I heard some deejays complain over the air that the song was even worst than all the previous Idol winner first singles. I wouldn't go so far to say that. I think it's just as bad as all the previous Idol winner first singles.
So as usual, both the finalists had to have a take at the song... and as always, with inspirational fluff-type songs, the more 'conventional' singer will perform it better. In this case, Kris Allen performed it better, while, Adam Lambert, being a wonderfully entertaining performer but certainly not conventional, looked totally out of place with that song. Adam's the rocker dude who can take any songs and rocker-fy it (that word should be in a dictionary somewhere), somewhat mangle it, yet still be entertaining (case in point, what he did with Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire). But on a song like THAT, even the way he performed it last night, you could kinda see the look of "Save me from singing this song!!!" all over his face. And the screaming that he usually does in his songs sounded more strangled than usual.
As such, although I've been rooting for Lambert all this time, and I still think he's most likely going to take the crown, I hate the thought of hearing Adam singing that song as his first single... and with American Idol being so commercialized and all, if he won, Adam would have less freedom to go down his own creative path, at least for the first couple of albums or so until he starts to take the reigns like what Kelly Clarkson did... and he's a performer who needs his freedom. Kris would be fine going down the commerlized path, and to his benefit, he actually performed all his 3 songs last night really well, even better than Adam, IMHO. But at the finale stage, people need to look at the performances of the finalists throughout the season, and based on that, Adam has been rocking the whole time (except for that one week when he was in the bottom 3, his performance was less rocking and I wasn't too surprised). Kris is a genius in his own right in that he knows how to take a song and make it totally different from the original, but in such a good way that he managed to rope in enough votes to get him to this stage. But in terms of his voice and and style, there is nothing else that makes him stand out other than his ability to do great covers of other people's songs. Would he do superbly performing a bunch of his own new songs? I doubt it. Perhaps he should just stick to doing covers of other peoples' songs for the rest of his life.
So win or lose, I don't really give a hoot now. Adam will still rock on.
Totally love Lambert, but Kris Allen should be the new American Idol
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